Speech Quality Quotes

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

Whatever doubt there may be as to the quality or purpose of our free speech we certainly have ample volumes in production.

It is much better when a member resumes his seat after he has made a speech for the House to have the feeling that they wish he had gone on longer instead of wondering why he did not stop sooner.

A thing said walks in immortality if it has been said well.

Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

He is a third rate Western lawyer…they take a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar and whose speeches are illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.

Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln wrote it on his way to the site of the speech on the back of an envelope. One guy on the back of an envelope wrote the great Gettysburg Address - while every night it takes six guys to write this crap!

Most people, when they talk fast, they get flat.

There's a fashion abroad generally to speak the language as badly as possible. I'm of a mind to start a society for the reinstatement of the letter 't' and the banishment of the glottal stop.

Sustentative ideas are more important than applause lines. Substance makes speeches.

When you're standing in front of an audience like this that is so enthusiastic and so much behind you, it is very hard to give a bad speech. Even a bad speech sounds good in a convention hall like this.

I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.